From major retrospectives of icons such as Nancy Spero and Giorgio Griffin to showcases on modernism’s lasting influence across mediums in today’s visual arts, here is your itinerary for the top 10 gallery openings to attend in New York this week.

This uncommonly well-timed group show allows viewers to examine the legacy of late modernism — its austerity, its fascination with bold, simple color, and its preoccupation with medium and material — on contemporary artists working today. Viewers who thought these themes could only be fully examined in painting might be surprised by the showings in photography, video, installation, and even digital art. (Through February 9, 2013)

Fortunately, anyone who saw the billboard designed by British artist David Shrigley above the High Line this past spring is now familiar with one of the most darkly comic artists ever to grace the walls of a contemporary art gallery. Having already applied his skills as a draftsman to T-shirts (his work is also a regular source of inspiration among tattoo artists), Shrigley is rarely flummoxed by choice of venue or medium. In this series of large wall texts, he looks right at home. (Through February 16, 2013)

After 40 years away from New York, Italian painter Giorgio Griffa returns to the city for a retrospective at Casey Kaplan. While lesser-known on this side of the Atlantic, Griffa’s large-scale Abstract paintings — with vibrant forms and colors masterfully painted onto un-stretched, creased canvases — have made him one of Italy’s foremost avant-garde painters for much of his career. (Through March 2, 2013)

South Africa-born, Berlin-based Robin Rhode joined Lehmann Maupin in early 2012, and in this first exhibition with the gallery he’s taking over both of their NYC locations with his kinetic creativity. Known for his use of spatial play with large-scale drawings in photographs and animations, here he will be presenting the latest of his street art interactions in Chelsea, including “shattering” a spray-painted wine glass with a crowbar via image adjustments in freeze-frame, and also showing “an educational wall drawing intervention” he created with Time In, an outreach art program for children, on the Lower East Side. (Through March 9, 2013)

Daniel Buren: “Electricity Paper Vinyl... Works in Situ & Situated Works From 1968 to 2013 (Dedicated to Michael Asher)” at Bortolami Gallery, 520 West 20th Street, and at Petzel Gallery, 456 West 18th Street, 6–8 p.m.

The first New York show of Spero’s work since her death in 2009, “From Victimage to Liberation,” focuses on the artist’s narrative collages. Brimming with pagan ur-mothers, Fredericks of Hollywood models, acrobats, and Argentine dissidents, Spero’s works take inventory of a vast spectrum of female representation. (Through February 16, 2013)

The Brooklyn/Montréal exchange begins its Brooklyn-based exhibitions this week, one of which is photographer and video artist Isabelle Hayeur’s visual inquiry into the increasingly polluted waters alongside her home in Southern Florida. The images, taken with a submersible camera, offer glimpses of two different worlds: the crumbling industrial infrastructure, amongst other forms of land-life, sitting above hazy, dirtied waters forced to absorb the impact of the terrestrial development far below the surface. (Through February 10, 2013)

One hundred paintings of plaid in varying colors, textures, and forms will somehow be installed in Auxiliary Project's tiny space for their second show in the gallery. If this feat of installation is not enticing enough, Forsyth's intriguing works presented en masse ought to be. (Through February 10, 2013)

This promises to be a mesmerizing experience: recline in Pierogi’s towering Boiler space and watch the sky of Los Angeles scroll by on the ceiling. Kevin Cooley, whose other digital media projects include turning a building on the High Line into a flashing beacon of synced televisions in 2011, made the large-scale projection “Skyward” through merging film of the inhabitants of the California skies, both natural and manmade, where airplanes, blimps, and bees hover by the clouds. (Through February 17, 2013)